In this essay I will be discussing and comparing Virginia Woolf’s conception of women’s writing, namely in her essay A Room of One’s Own, with that of Alice Walker’s in her essay In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Despite both women contributing a great deal to the feminist literary movement respective of their time, there are indubitable limitations to their arguments, of which I will be discussing in the following essay. Furthermore, it is important not to separate the person behind the writing, as it unquestionably affects the outcome of their argument, hence why I will be comparing that of Walker and Woolf both.
Virginia Woolf’s conception of women’s writing in her essay A Room of One’s Own, insists on the economic importance of a writer, as well as the materialist state of culture in which money will elevate a person’s status to one in which they can afford to, metaphorically and literally, isolate themselves from responsibilities in order to focus on writing. Woolf argues that historically, female writers have been unable to do this due to the patriarchal society which deemed that women had more dire responsibilities other than artistically expressing themselves. Due to this, Woolf focuses on the idea of a woman needing £500 a year and a room of her own with a lock on it, in order to create meaningful art. Woolf reveals to her audience that she had been lucky enough to receive a hefty inheritance from her aunt Mary Beton, admitting that “my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me” , and recalls “what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.” With this, Woolf is highlighting the materialist cause which permeates good writing – she ceases to feel anger or fear as her financial status is a stable one, and is able to focus on her own self-expression fully. It should be noted however that despite Woolf’s belief that intellectual freedom is dependent on materialism, she was by no means a Marxist and her feminist politics include a mere diluted version of materialism.
Woolf does not necessarily say it is impossible for a woman to artistically express herself without having the privileges she set out; however, she argues that her writing would be heavily stifled and plagued with anger and hate. This is due to the fact that her mind would be “disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred” , which men do not have to face as they are usually the ones that are “hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to do what she wants to do – which is to write.” Likewise, a wealthy woman who can escape from the social responsibilities bestowed upon her by these very same men, can also escape the “fear and hatred”, as she is isolated from society altogether. This is the only way, Woolf theorises, that women can intellectually prevail.
Woolf goes on to example her theory by fictionalising that if William Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, who was equally as gifted as he was, she would end up killing herself due to being shunned whilst her brother was celebrated for that same talent. “… for genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.” With this, Woolf is arguing that not only does a woman have to be of certain financial stability, she also needs to be of a certain class in order for the gift of writing to even manifest itself as it should, otherwise, the societal pressures a woman faces on top of the desire to write, would create detrimental mental turmoil. She claims that a “highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.” This is a fairly classist and subjective view, as it suggests that lower-class women are unable to think intellectually at all, regardless of whether they have the financial means to exercise the intellect.
In her essay, which was constructed from a series of lectures she had given throughout her life, Woolf speaks to a female audience about her experiences at a fictional university called Oxbridge. She assumes the place of an unnamed narrator in order to fixate the women and have them believe her experience is a shared one amongst them all. Woolf eschews that the exclusion of women in social, political and economic domains has injurious effects on the progression of society, and she examples this by comparing a co-ed lunch she has at the college, in which conversation flows vehemently and is reminiscent to a poetic humming voice “not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves.” On the other hand, the all-female dinner she has is void of all poetry, and is quite frankly dull in both the food as well as the conversation and stifles her inspiration. From this, Woolf concludes that “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” signifying that the female exclusion from the rest of society has a detrimental impact on the rest of a woman’s life and impedes on her ability to function intellectually. She concludes that the reason for the all-female conversation being dull was not necessarily that it lacked a male presence, but more so that it lacked the economic funding that the male college had.
One of the primary critiques Alice Walker has of Woolf is her insistence that an intellectual woman of low-class and little money, as exampled by the fictional ‘Judith’ Shakespeare, would turn to suicide as a way of dealing with the way society stifles her art. Woolf’s argument sits well along the lines of Hélène Cixous’ argument that “we are living in an age where the conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being undermined”, which is a statement that may have been true for white middle class women in 1975, however it was not the case and to some extent is still not the case for many poor women of colour. This is because before being a sexist culture, society is built upon a class structure that systematically stifles the economically underprivileged. This is something which Woolf fails to understand. Walker recognises the limitations of this argument in her essay In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, by exampling the writing of the first African American female to publish a book of poetry, Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley was sold to her masters at the age of seven and was conditioned to believe that she was in the hands of a loving family who had “rescued” her from the “ “savagery” of Africa”” , describing her owner as a “goddess” – Wheatley was clearly led astray and died trying to ascertain her desire for self-expression meanwhile being mistreated under the thumb of a cruel slave master. All that Woolf feared – no financial independence, being under the ownership of someone else, having no de facto freedom – let alone intellectual freedom – remained a mere fear of Woolf as it did many other middle-class white women, however this was the reality of Wheatley and many other women like her. Walker hones in on Woolf’s certainty that ‘Judith’ Shakespeare’s “contrary instincts” would have driven her to suicide, and argues that these are the same instincts which Wheatley must have felt – being mistreated and misled about who she was. With this, Walker is trying to demonstrate that Woolf’s hypothetical fears, as embodied through ‘Judith’ Shakespeare – remain hypothetical for her. Therefore, Woolf’s conception of women’s writing is severely stifled by her Eurocentric perspective and life as a middle-class white woman and her essay shows little knowledge about intersectional feminism.
Walker also answers Woolf’s theory of a woman needing £500 a year and a room of one’s own in order to intellectually and artistically express herself, with a question “What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?” this provocative question serves to show the limitations of Woolf’s argument, as it does not take into account women of colour who were not even allowed to read and write for the majority of their time under the captivity of the Western world, let alone find the time to. De Beauvoir rightly questioned this notion by asking “how can independence be recovered in a state of dependency?” especially in 20th century America, in which the welfare state and ‘war on drugs’, created a more hostile environment for the black community, it further questions how exactly Woolf’s theory is supposed to be manifested for the black woman. Walker however, makes it clear that the state of the world does not take away the purpose and significance of female creativity. For instance, Walker gives a personal account of her mother’s self-expression. She describes how her mother laboured “beside – not behind – my father in the fields” showing a sense of equality amongst men and women of colour, despite being heavily undermined by their white superiors. She goes on to say that “there was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption” , yet she still found a way to manage a creative outlet – gardening. She describes the legacy of her mother and “her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift” , and how her mother’s simple, yet esteemed talent was famed around the neighbourhood and a source for Walker’s own inspiration. This shows that creativity is not a practice limited to just those of an esteemed class and financial security, and completely disproves Woolf’s argument that a woman needs £500 a year, and a room of one’s own.
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